


origin

by lyricalprose (fairylights)



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-18
Updated: 2013-07-18
Packaged: 2017-12-20 13:44:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/887952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairylights/pseuds/lyricalprose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She hates the question “where are you from?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	origin

 

She hates the question “where are you from?”, because she doesn’t have an answer to it – not one that other people would understand, anyways. She’s never had to explain it before leaving Voyager, before coming to the Alpha Quadrant.

When she’s younger, right after Voyager comes “home”, she gets asked that question a few times, by other kids she meets who don’t know her story, or by well-meaning adults curious about the little half-human, half-Ktarian girl (which, she begins to notice quickly, is not a very common thing to be).

The sensation of being _uncommon_ , of being particularly different from the norm – of there even _being_ a “norm” – is itself kind of a strange feeling. She was never _strange_ on Voyager, never particularly _fascinating_ (except to her mother, but moms, of course, didn’t count). She was Naomi Wildman, captain’s assistant and Seven of Nine’s kadis-kot partner, sometime assistant to Neelix in the mess and, as Commander Tuvok had put it, “hardly a disturbance to the overall safety and efficiency of the ship.”

Growing up dealing with Borg attacks and a new alien species every other week might have something to do with all that. Being a human-Ktarian hybrid is hardly shocking or even particularly interesting when confronted with an alien species whose glowing organs show though the open pockets of their exoskeletons.

She misses that feeling – of fitting in with the rest of the extraordinary.

When she first gets asked “where are you from?”, right after they come to Earth, she answers “well, I was born on a starship”, hoping that this will clear things up. Instead, it just leaves people looking at her expectantly, waiting for the rest of the answer, while she stutters out “so I don’t really have a home – I mean, I have a _home_ , just not here, not on Earth, but my mom’s from San Francisco, and my dad’s from Ktaris but he lives on Deep Space Nine–” and they look at her with pity in their eyes, thinking _the poor child doesn’t have a home_ , and Naomi _hates_ it.

Even as she grows older, while she goes to school in real classrooms and lives in a house on Earth and in a cabin on Deep Space Nine, while she attends Starfleet Academy and majors in astrometrics and becomes a stellar cartographer on the U.S.S. _Vanguard_ , charting the stars that she thinks she _could_ call home, she still gets asked the same question, and she still doesn’t have much of an answer. Sometimes she answers “the Delta Quadrant”, just to see how people will react, and sometimes, if she’s not feeling much like talking, she’ll rattle off one of her parents’ homeworlds, or say that she grew up on Deep Space Nine (which is only half a lie) – but those aren’t the right answers either.

She can’t quite think of a way to explain to people that home was (is) _Voyager_ , the bridge and the bulkheads and Neelix and Seven and the Captain, is her and Mom looking out the cabin windows naming nebulas. Home is the great black-blue infinity of space, home is the wide unending expanse of new thoughts, new people, new places.

Home is a starship and a blank map stretched out beyond – her loose, unfettered roots stretching out and twining around the stars.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written and posted in 2009, on LJ, under a different penname (theredfeather).


End file.
